Signed by the Dalai Lama, with contributing authors Robert Thurman, Heather Stoddard, and Jakob Winkler and the beautiful photography of Thomas Laird, this book is clearly unique. Add a $12,000 price tag and you can be sure not everyone on the block has a copy. The book brings murals from the Himalayan region to you for just a few thousand dollars more than if you went to each of them. (Slight) joking aside, Managing Editor Florian Kobler explains that these printed images… Read more

The Dalai Lama has many interests. As a child in Tibet’s Potala Palace he studied Tibetan philosophy, meditation, and politics. He was, after all, being groomed to be the religious and temporal leader of the Tibetan people. A keen student of Tibetan Buddhism will remind you that there were several branches or schools of Buddhism there at the time, so the Dalai Lama’s leadership in that sense was not Pope-like. And a keen student of Tibetan politics will tell you… Read more

Religion Dispatches (RD) posted an interview last week with Matthew Walton discussing his book on Buddhism and politics in contemporary Burma. Walton is the Aung San Suu Kyi Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies at St Antony’s College at the University of Oxford. His research has focused on religion and politics in Southeast Asia. He is the founder of the Oxford based blog/website discussing contemporary Burma: Tea Circle. The Moral Universe The book, Buddhism, Politics, and Political Thought in Myanmar, was… Read more

A guest post by Robertson Work Anyone who is awake today is aware of the many dangers and possibilities facing our country and world in this make-or-break year and decade. Here are some of my reflections and advice for you sensitive and responsive ones, taken from my new book, A Compassionate Civilization: The Urgency of Sustainable Development and Mindful Activism. “After I had been a UNDP staff member for many years, people would sometimes ask me if I had just… Read more

That is the start of the recent Reuters investigative story, released late last week. Two of the journalists involved spent months in prison for their work, a testament to the cost of seeking out truth in this still quite brutal military dictatorship (with its veneer of democratic rule). “At least two were hacked to death by Buddhist villagers” according to the Reuters story, which “draws for the first time on interviews with Buddhist villagers who confessed to torching Rohingya homes,… Read more

His Holiness the Dalai Lama turned to twitter on Friday to restate a message which has become central to him in recent years: we must act. The full tweet reads: Although I am a Buddhist monk, I am skeptical that prayers alone will achieve world peace. We need instead to be enthusiastic and self-confident in taking action. — Dalai Lama (@DalaiLama) February 9, 2018 This is not to say that mental training is useless. His other tweets (and much of… Read more

“Taiwanese computer and technology firm Acer is set to launch a new smart product: Buddhist prayer beads that automatically count the number of times a mantra is recited and transfer merits to a social media platform,” reported the Hong Kong Economic Journal last week. The original article in Chinese is here (no press release from Acer itself could be found). Acer has reportedly received “tens of thousands” of pre-orders for the beads, which look identical to traditional beads (or malas)… Read more

It can be difficult to keep up on the news coming out of Burma (Myanmar). Like the situation in Syria, the length and scale of the human disaster can become too large to fathom. In such cases, it can be easy to feel helpless. And, as the Zen teacher Brad Warner rightly noted recently, not every Buddhist has to speak out – about this or any particular issue. However, as with all moral crises, there will be those who feel called… Read more

These four residential programs (Living the Practice at Dharma Realm Buddhist University; Guan Yin Sessions at City of Ten Thousand Buddhas; Woodenfish Humanistic Buddhist Monastic Life Program in China; and Fo Guang Buddhist Monastic Retreat in Taiwan) are helpful for undergraduates or graduate students particularly interested in Asian studies, China, Buddhism, or religion, but are open to any adult, don’t even have to be a student! No Chinese-language experience required. Applications are now open for all four of these! Summary… Read more

Very few people are trained in both (Western) philosophy and Buddhist studies these days. Those trained in philosophy are typically taught that Philosophy is only a Western activity – and by Western they mean Euro-American (plus Canada and Australia, but definitely leaving out non-White sources). Those trained in Buddhist studies are typically taught as philologists, anthropologists, and/or scholars of religion. And, for various reasons, these folks tend also to see philosophy as just a Euro-American undertaking. Over the years, a… Read more